Paris Climate Deal: Trudeau Government To Ratify Accord Before Reaching National Plan

OTTAWA — The Liberal government will ratify the international Paris climate accord this fall even before it reaches a deal with the provinces and territories on how to meet the country's 2030 emissions target.

Senior government sources told The Canadian Press that Canada will deposit its ratification at the United Nations before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets the premiers for a promised first ministers meeting on a climate plan that's been under discussion for months.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been lobbying countries to ratify the Paris agreement before the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election in hopes of locking in the accord's provisions for at least four years. The landmark pact, which calls for limiting global temperature increases this century to well below two degrees Celsius, only comes into legal force after 55 countries representing 55 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions formally ratify.

The timing of Trudeau's meeting with premiers is in flux but it does not appear likely to take place before Canadian representatives are back at a UN climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco, Nov. 7-18, to discuss implementation of the Paris accord.

The Marrakech meeting, known as COP22, is not considered a leader-level summit and Trudeau will not attend, said the sources.

Canada has spotty carbon-cutting record

Canada has a consistent history under successive Liberal and Conservative governments of making international carbon-cutting promises that it fails to honour, first under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and then again under the 2009 Copenhagen agreement.

The Liberal government of Jean Chretien ratified the original Kyoto climate accord despite having no idea how to meet Canada's emissions-cutting pledges, a fact later publicly acknowledged by Chretien's former chief of staff Eddie Goldenberg.

That history provides opposition parties plenty of material to hammer the Liberal government.

Conservative environment critic Ed Fast said in an email that Trudeau is not respecting federal-provincial relations.

"Prime Minister Trudeau, in signing the Paris Agreement before finalizing his pan-Canadian framework on climate change, is making the same mistake Jean Chretien made with the Kyoto accord: acting alone without the support of the provinces and territories," said Fast.

"Prime Minister Trudeau, in signing the Paris Agreement before finalizing his pan-Canadian framework on climate change, is making the same mistake Jean Chretien made with the Kyoto accord: acting alone without the support of the provinces and territories."— Tory environment critic Ed Fast

NDP environment critic Linda Duncan called it "deja vu all over again."

She said the Liberals are still using the old Conservative emissions target, which won't get Canada to its previous Copenhagen commitment let alone the more stringent Paris promise. And Duncan also noted that ratification of Paris is supposed to be accompanied by a credible plan for achieving national targets.

Environmentalists are wary, but see the logic of early ratification.

"Ratification by Canada will help build the global momentum for action on climate change," said Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada.

"To be taken seriously, however, we need a plan to actually turn those lovely words into deeds. We don't want to repeat the Kyoto Protocol experience."

Feds believe provinces are on board

The Liberals won a majority mandate last fall on a platform that pledged swift and serious climate action, saying "We'll meet the provinces within 90 days of the UN Climate Change Conference this December to develop a carbon pricing policy."

Trudeau did indeed meet the premiers last March in Vancouver, where they agreed to a negotiation process on a suite of climate policies, including an examination of carbon pricing. Four working groups on policy options are expected to file final reports soon, having missed their Sept. 2 deadline for completion.

The government argues that the provinces effectively signed on to Paris through the Vancouver Declaration and Ottawa can now ratify the accord even without detailed plans in place.

'Canada has a working target'

Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, who has been criss-crossing the country all summer in quiet deliberations, is to meet her provincial and territorial counterparts Oct. 3 in Montreal to discuss the working group options. Both federal and provincial sources suggest there's a great deal of work yet to be done, with carbon pricing a particular sticking point.

The previous Conservative government set a target of reducing Canada's emissions 30 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, a target adopted "as a floor" by the incoming Liberals. That 2030 target won't be lowered in this round of climate planning, said McKenna's spokeswoman Caitlin Workman.

"Canada has a target right now," said Workman. "It's already going to be, quite frankly, very challenging to meet that target."

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Climate Change: 10 Beautiful Places Under Threat

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The impacts of climate warming in Alaska are already occurring, experts have warned.
Over the past 50 years, temperatures across Alaska increased by an average of 3.4°F.
Winter warming was even greater, rising by an average of 6.3°F jeopardising its famous glaciers and frozen tundra.

The most fragile of Italian cities has been sinking for centuries. Long famous for being the city that is partially under water, sea level rise associated with global warming would have an enormous impact on Venice and the surrounding region.
The Italian government has begun constructing steel gates at the entrances to the Venetian lagoon, designed to block tidal surges from flooding the city. However, these barriers may not be enough to cope with global warming.

The West Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming areas on Earth, with only some areas of the Arctic Circle experiencing faster rising temperatures.
Over the past 50 years, temperatures in parts of the continent have jumped between 5 and 6 degrees F— a rate five times faster than the global average.
A 2008 report commissioned by WWF warned that if global temperatures rise 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial averages, sea ice in the Southern Ocean could shrink by 10 to 15 percent.

The rapid decline of the world's coral reefs appears to be accelerating, threatening to destroy huge swathes of marine life unless dramatic action is swiftly taken, leading ocean scientists have warned.
About half of the world's coral reefs have already been destroyed over the past 30 years, as climate change warms the sea and rising carbon emissions make it more acidic.

The world's highest mountain range contains the planet's largest non-polar ice mass, with over 46,000 glaciers.
The mammoth glaciers cross eight countries and are the source of drinking water, irrigation and hydroelectric power for roughly 1.5 billion people. And just like in Antarctica, the ice is melting.

An expected 2°C rise in the world’s average temperatures in the next decades will impact island economies such as the Maldives with extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels.

Over the last century, global warming has caused all Alpine glaciers to recede. Scientists predict that most of the glaciers in the Alps could be gone by 2050.
Global warming will also bring about changes in rain and snowfall patterns and an increase in the frequency of extreme meteorological events, such as floods and avalanches, experts have warned.

The Arctic is ground zero for climate change, warming at a rate of almost twice the global average.
The sea ice that is a critical component of Arctic marine ecosystems is projected to disappear in the summer within a generation.

Called the "epicenter of the current global extinction," by Conservation International, this smattering of more than 4,000 South Pacific islands is at risk from both local human activity and global climate change.